


threshold children

by ncfan



Category: Camelot Rising Trilogy - Kiersten White, The Guinevere Deception - Kiersten White
Genre: Gen, POV Alternating, The shared angst of being half-human children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26296318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Here, you must work with a love that is missing, a love that is incomprehensible, a mask with no face behind it, a past so mutilated that it can be neither an answer nor even a question. You must live in a world whose only place for your kind is in the margins of the pages of the history books, unless you forge another path, and you may find that path runs directly into the void.
Relationships: Guinevere & Mordred, Guinevere/Mordred (Arthurian)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	threshold children

When he is very small, so small that Mother can fit him easily on her hip but not so small that he does not retain the memory for the rest of his life, Mordred meets his father for the very first time.

There is a wood so verdant-green that it hurts the eyes and scalds the mind if you dwell upon it too much. No danger of ever being hurt or scalded by it, no, not anymore. When the world of men decided there was no room left for magic, when they began to push magic out to the boundaries of everything that ever was, is, or will be, that wood was one of first things to go. The tale of its murder is long and sad, and Mordred has little desire to recount it, though the streaks of flame rending the night sky as burning arrows hailed down upon it still shine on the underside of his eyelids when he allows his attention to wander.

In his memories, the wood hurts his eyes and scalds his mind. Mordred cannot remember if it was always thus, or if perhaps the memory of its destruction has bled into his recollection of it as it was when it was in its glory and more than a few blackened stumps glistening with soot beneath a pitiless dawn sun. It does not matter, either way. He is accustomed to pain. Pain is an old friend he has let into every aspect of himself, day and night, waking and dreaming. Pain is not enough to stop him.

In the mists of time gone out of reach of what yet lives, there is a wood so verdant-green that it has never known a frost. Mother takes him to that place when he is small, and there, he meets his father.

Mordred… Mordred has always had a difficult time describing his father to others as he knew him, and not as the knight of vine and root whom Arthur slew. He is not a human creature, not entirely, the aches that assail him in proximity to iron and the screaming agony he can scarcely hide when Arthur holds out Excalibur put paid to any lie that Mordred is entirely made up of human material. There is earth in him, earth and green and sunlight and a sort of life, wild and untamed and untamable, that cannot ever be fully contained in human flesh, though the world Arthur seeks to create will crush him in between the margins, make the places he can exist in narrower and narrower until there’s never enough room to move, never enough room to breathe, never enough room to live. There is earth in him, but his mind is mostly human, and his mind persistently skates over the memory of what his father looked like when he was not a knight of vine and root. It’s not something a human can really perceive, no matter how much they wish for it, no matter how much they wish to hold hi face in their mind

And yet, he remembers the day vividly. The sun shone down through the thick, sheltering canopy of the trees, and his mother was smiling as he rarely saw her smile, after Arthur had been born. Mordred cannot remember his father’s face as it was when he was not a knight who could do battle with men, but he remembers the hand that had pressed gently to the crown of his head. The hand had pulsed with something that was not blood, and as its fingers combed gently through Mordred’s hair, tiny white flower buds like drops of snow sprang up from the ropy green something that in a human would have been flesh.

-

Somewhere, entombed in the memory of the world, is a child whose name was utterly effaced from the world by her father. He had his reasons, as all men who do such things have their reasons. He had his reasons, and yet the violence he did to his child has dashed her into pieces that can never again be stitched back into a whole person, for some of the pieces of who she once was have been obliterated entirely, and even with the cleverest hands and the sturdiest thread, there will still be empty places within her where nothing but oblivion is to be found. Her name has fallen into that lightless oblivion, and so too has—

Here is something the girl that child has become no longer remembers. Here is something the girl that child has become, the girl whose face is split in two beneath the skin and whose mind has splintered into scintillating shards of memory and sensation and crumbs of knowledge that swirl around her in a disorienting haze that she will eventually cease even trying to make sense of, here is something she no longer knows about herself.

Once upon a time, the child had no fear of water, running or still.

Once upon a time, the water held no horror for her, and she would never have even imagined that it could.

Once upon a time, she loved the water as much as any child ever had. Once upon a time, she swam like a fish and could hold her breath longer than any human child ever could, before she realized that there was no need, for there was no water that would have ever let her drown.

Those are memories that have fallen out of the world. Those are coursing embraces and burbling lullabies that have fallen out of the world. That is a face that has not fallen out of the world, but will never be recognizable again, will never sit in the girl’s heart again in pride of place as it once did, as it still should.

-

Truth be told, there are few who wish to speak to Mordred of his father. His mother is… it’s best not to dwell too long on his mother. His maternal grandmother had not approved of the match, or so Mordred was made to understand after her death took the time to engrave itself upon the hearts of those who did not care to live without her. When he was alive, she breathed not one word of her disapproval where the product of the union could hear her, and treated Mordred much the same as she had treated the children of her own flesh. It’s a comforting thought that she was willing to love him just the same, but at the same time, he feels almost cheated not to have known the truth while she was still alive. Learning that she had disapproved of the match between her daughter and what her daughter took for a husband makes him feel as if he never really knew his maternal grandmother in full. He was only presented with one aspect of her, and now that she is gone, he can only take the death mask up in his hands and find emptiness beneath, where there should have been a corpse.

His paternal grandmother is… difficult to talk to. It’s not that _she’s_ difficult, not with Mordred. There are many who find his paternal grandmother difficult, and more than difficult, but he has always been the adored grandchild, the fact that he is as much flesh as green overlooked in light of the fact that his mother is a powerful sorcerer and he himself is far, far more receptive to their world than any purely human child could ever have hoped to be. It’s not the sort of love that keeps you warm at night, his paternal grandmother’s love. It’s the fierce, unforgiving love of one who can act as your avenger, one who can transmit your legacy and ensure that you will not disappear from the world. It’s a love that makes you ache for something else. Mordred has never known what that something is. He could never put a name to it if he tried.

For the most part, his paternal grandmother’s love is consuming enough that he can ignore the ache. But that does not alter the truth: she is difficult to speak to, in any linear way. Mordred may be both flesh and green, but his mind works in mostly human ways, and the non-linear conversations his paternal grandmother is capable of are difficult to follow at the best of times. Mordred would be poring over every detail she cared to tell him, which would certainly help with comprehension, but he knows her and he knows that she can unleash so much more information and input than any human or mostly-human mind could ever hope to absorb and retain without it all spinning into something totally incomprehensible to him.

Arthur, _Arthur_ , Mordred suspects, avoids the subject out of some sense of guilt. He’d not made the connection between his brother-in-law and the knight of wood and vine he slew until after the deed was done, and most days, Mordred wonders why it is that Arthur would ever behave even remotely as if he regretted the deed, considering that his father’s corpse was one of the corpses he was obliged to tread over to shape the kingdom as he wished to.

(He never says what he thinks of it. He cannot say what he thinks of it. Most men think of Mordred’s silence regarding his father’s fall, and when they think of his close-mouthed refusal to discuss it, there is only one reason they ever entertain as to why the king’s nephew would be so silent considering the fact that the king slew his father to make his kingdom. They lack imagination. Most men lack imagination, so this is not surprising. But they do, you know, they are totally lacking in imagination. Why entertain one reason for silence, when you can entertain several?)

Arthur skirts around the subject of both of Mordred’s parents, actually. Where it concerns his mother, Mordred has an easier time understanding his cagey, skittish silence. When you have a sister older enough than you to have a child who is themselves older than you, and that sister, whom under other circumstances might well have been like an aunt or a second mother to you, instead tries to put you to death in your cradle to send a message to your deceiver and rapist of a father, that… The rational mind understands why you would avoid speaking of your sister. But when it comes to Mordred’s father, Mordred does not understand Arthur’s silence. He does not understand it at all. He does not understand what it is he should or does feel regarding it, beyond the low simmer of resentment, for that resentment cooks alongside so many other different ingredients that Mordred could not ever tell you what the full breadth of it is supposed to be.

Those knights who are blessed, or cursed, depending on what angle you view it from, with knowledge of Mordred’s paternity, regard him with varying degrees of suspicion that they have no doubt considered themselves vindicated in, though in this case also, Mordred considers them entirely lacking in imagination. None of them speak of Mordred’s father. The silence in their case is easier to pick apart than Arthur’s, for it is a simpler beast and one Mordred has come to know very well. He knows the look in their eyes when they look at him. He knows that they are regarding him for some sign of monstrousness that must dwell within, for they do not know that all they will ever see when they look at him is what they look upon already.

Guinevere…

It’s… It’s rather different, with Guinevere.

She has expressed curiosity, from time to time. Perhaps she is curious even now, trammeled within the stone cage she chose over any chance at freedom, any chance at forging a world where creatures such as they can live and thrive and do anything but suffer the slow, lingering death of suffocation and crushing and drowning as the world Arthur seeks to create grows and grows and grows and it pushes their world and everything and everyone in it further to the margins of all that exists and there is nothing left for them anymore, no room to move, no air to breathe, no light to bathe their skin and sustain them.

(Mordred does not always think that Arthur is aware that that is what he’s doing. He does not always think that Arthur truly realizes that the world he seeks to create has no room in it for either his nephew or his queen. And he knows, he _knows_ , that Arthur’s enthusiasm for it does not match even slightly the most zealous of his knights and his councilors. But what does that _matter_ , really? Even if Arthur is ignorant, even if he is not as ignorant as he seems at first blush but his coolness on the subject is as Mordred thinks it is, what does it _matter_? He will still have brought misfortune and death down on yet more of his family. He will still be the wielder of Excalibur, still be the chosen hangman for his nephew and his queen alike. It does not matter.

It should not matter.

Why does Mordred wish for it to matter?)

Mordred has seen curiosity light the fire of Guinevere’s shifting-color eyes, has seen moments when dull, muddled gray will ignite to blue or green even within the walls of Camelot. There is something else behind it, something Mordred has never been able to put a name to, never able to reach out and touch. It puts a giddy anticipation deep in his breast, even as it sparks foreboding in his mind. (He has never been able to find an explanation that suits him regarding just who Guinevere’s mother was. Oh, he can have a long, good _guess_ as to the general nature of Guinevere’s mother, and it makes a fair amount of sense, considering Merlin’s own nature and Merlin’s own proclivities. But the question of Guinevere’s mother is one that nags at him, and only nags more and more as time wears on.) But that is beyond them both, now, and he does not know when either of them will be given such an opportunity to speak thus again.

People, by and large, do not wish to speak to Mordred regarding his father. There is some irritation to be sparked in this silence, as multi-faceted and rarely welcoming as it is. The world tries to obliterate one half of his heritage from the face of the earth, and it cannot do that without murdering everything that he is, for the human parts cannot be extricated from the green, from grass and sunlight and wood and vine. A refusal to speak of his father is only a precursor to more violence to come.

There is some irritation in it, but there is something there also that isn’t quite relief, can _not_ be relief, he will not acknowledge it as thus. Mordred does not leave his relief out in the open where it can be gawked at, particularly not now. He would never leave it in places where anyone could just stare at it, for he cannot think of a single person who would not stare down upon it and judge. (He can think of one. He can think of two. He does not think of them much. He cannot, _cannot_.)

Mordred does not reveal relief easily. He does not let it drag itself from him, from the dark, sheltered places where it can be nursed and hidden.

But on the page, in the throes of a story, there is nowhere for his private thoughts and emotions to hide. There is nowhere you can turn where the audience is not looking at you. Even when you’ve fled out of the scene, their thoughts are upon you. The audience is beyond your control, and the audience can pick you apart at their leisure, no matter how you kick or scream or squirm.

Few ever speak to Mordred of his father, and there are even fewer who _wish_ to speak to him of his father. It irritates him. It relieves him. He has spent years trying to piece together what he would even _say_ , and though he has had years of opportunity to try to stitch something that he could slip over his mouth that would tell his story for him, his hands are useless, and his mouth even more so.

-

Someone must have taught her knot magic.

Someone must have hummed the strains of music that ring in the back of her mind all the time when she lets her mind wander, but can never, ever remember in full.

She must have had a name that wasn’t Guinevere, once.

She must have had a mother, once.

Guinevere knows the truth, now, of why she was sent to Camelot. She knows that every story she was ever fed about needing to go there as Arthur’s protector was a lie. She knows that her original purpose in going to be Arthur’s protector, Arthur’s queen, Arthur’s councilor standing behind him in the shadows, watching for threats from the world of magic, it was all a sham. She has tried to carve out a role for herself anyways. Even if she is only here to be protected, she wishes for a role for herself.

Arthur is… He’s cooperative. He’s… Guinevere wonders, at times, if she will ever love him the way the songs sing of how wives are supposed to love their husbands. She thinks she could, but she has no idea _when_. She doesn’t know when that love is supposed to descend upon her, doesn’t know if she’s even composed of the right materials to love someone the way the songs sing of how faithful wives love their husbands, let alone the wielder of that… of _Excalibur_.

She wonders, sometimes, if he loves her the way the songs sing of how faithful husbands love their wives. Guinevere has been in Camelot long enough to have heard many of those songs. She has heard the tales told and sung of men who fulfill impossible quests for the sake of their lady loves. She has heard of Odysseus separated from Penelope for twenty years, and yet he returned to her, yet he shunned the love of every other lady who held her heart out to him in favor of his faithful wife, beset on all sides by unwanted suitors. She has heard tales told and sung of men who returned from death for the sakes of their wives, heard tales of men who have wrestled gods and won for the sakes of their wives, heard tales of men who moved mountains and slew dragons for their wives.

(She still remembers the dragon. She wonders, sometimes, why anyone would want to slay one, at least when it has not set out to kill and destroy. But that is not a strain of thought that matches with the fully-human strains that flood the near-insensate stone of Camelot, and thus, she keeps it to herself, works to keep it off her face.)

Guinevere wonders that, sometimes, and then she stops. They’re sweet thoughts, but they’re also sharp, also aching, also fit to cut, also something that Guinevere sometimes feels as if she is going to fall into, and then, _then_ , when she finds herself standing over the precipice, she has to stop. She does not know where the fall would take her. She is not certain that she would survive it. She is not certain that she would still recognize herself once her body found the end of the fall, even if she did survive.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Guinevere does not recognize herself, not really. She passes by a mirror or any polished surface, catches sight of her face in still water out of the corner of her eye, and she jolts, startled, for she has seen her face, even if only bits and pieces of it that cannot form the whole, and she does not recognize it.

It must have always been her face. It _has_ to have always been her face. Whatever it was that Merlin did to her that carved out great chunks of her memory and left her mind dangling in a great bloodied, gory mess, it cannot have extended to her appearance. The sort of magic you must weave to change someone’s appearance permanently (not the sort of deceptive illusion that can make a woman think that it is her husband who has come to her in the night, not the sort of deceptive illusion that allows a man to trick a woman into believing he is her husband, not the deceptive illusion that Merlin has shown such facility in) will damage the subject so thoroughly that Guinevere doubts she would be able to go about her life in any such manner as what she does in this present time.

It must have always been her face. It’s unlikely that Merlin unraveled the fabric of her body and reconstituted it into something with a different face. Unlikely, unlikely, one of the most unlikely things in the world, though Guinevere is not willing to entertain that there is nothing more unlikely than it; she has well learned the folly of assuming that nothing could be stranger than any one thing. The face that Guinevere bears now must have always been her face, slowly shifting from the chubby, unformed roundness of earliest childhood (Guinevere’s experience of children is as of yet limited, but that’s right, isn’t it?) to the adult shape it now bears. It must have always been her face. This must be the only face she has ever worn.

But there’s something so impermanent about her face as well. It feels like a mask, and Guinevere fears to touch under her chin and at her hairline, fears to find seams in her skin she could slip her fingernails under and _pull_. If she found the seams of the mask, she could rip the mask from the boundaries of true skin, and once she was holding the mask in her hands, what would be left would be—

What would be left would be something that feels truer to the sort of creature that Guinevere is. She would be closer to her true self with the mask ripped away, though what that true self even is, Guinevere does not have the words to describe or even conceive. But a life with no face whatsoever is not a life by any definition of the word. And Guinevere fears what she would find lying beneath the mask. Not a face, not a face, not a true face or a false face, for this face is the only face Guinevere has ever had or will have, but when she thinks of what could be behind the mask, her mind spirals out to so many different possibilities that she is quickly obliged to stop thinking about it at all. Some of the options will return to her in her dreams, she is certain. So long as they come to her only in dreams, she thinks she can bear it.

(There is something else that comes to her in dreams, something that is rather more difficult to bear. Guinevere cannot ever remember being totally submerged in water. It would be death for someone like her, or if not death, significantly injurious, at least. Guinevere cannot have ever been totally submerged in water, and yet, when she dreams, there comes to her ears sometimes the roar of rushing water coursing past her, the pressure of it pressing down on every inch of skin on her body, the strange, teasing sensation of her hair suspended in something heavier than air, fanning out all around her like a plume of tail feathers on a great black bird. She has never been totally submerged. Why does she dream of this?)

There is no denying the truth, though, that she wears a mask, and there is no face beneath. There _cannot_ be a face beneath, for Guinevere is one who cannot piece together in any pieces large enough to tell her even an imperfect, incomplete narrative of the story of her past. There can be no face below the mask when she cannot tell you anything about herself before coming here, except in anything but the barest scraps, devoid of all context, devoid of anything that might have made them make _sense_ to anyone who is not her.

(She dreads the inevitable moments when someone, anyone, asks her questions about her past. It’s difficult enough with Arthur, who knows the truth of her and what she is—though not the _whole_ truth, for if even Guinevere does not know that, then how can he?—and Guinevere is beginning to suspect that he might not be as satisfied as he used to be with her vague, rambling answers.

 _‘What is your true name?’_ Oh, if only she knew. In the beginning, she kept calling herself Guinevere, and she told herself it was because she needed to let her name sink into herself, that she could not risk Arthur ever calling her by her true name by accident, could not risk ever hearing it called out to someone else and then answering it, oh, the questions that would raise… But she knows the truth of that, now. She does not remember her true name. She has not remembered her true name for years. True names hold power for one such as her, and the death of it is a double-edged sword. With the death of her true name, sunk down into oblivion where no one can follow, any foes who wished to hurt her have lost this one avenue by which to gain power over her. But with her true name buried so deep that her hands could never hope to unearth it, buried so deep as to be effectively gone, she is diminished, diminished, and she will diminish further, and perhaps that is a fair price to pay for what Arthur hopes to build, but she wants to be here to _see_ it, and not waste away like a lily uprooted from the earth and left out in the sun.

It’s worse when it comes to everyone else, those who do not know the truth of her, as patchwork and hole-gaping a truth as it might be. There, she has to stitch together what little she knows of the real Guinevere into a tapestry of lies. She could never hope to remember her lies better than the real Guinevere could remember all the tales she must have had to tell of her parents, her sister, her homeland, her life in the convent, early experiences with tutors and maids and Christian prayer and sickness and death and—

It ought to be a happy occasion, when Brangien or Tristan or Dindrane or even some of those she is not particularly close to asks her what life was like for her in her homeland, asks her what games she and her ‘sister’ played when they were children, what lullabies her ‘mother’ sang to her when she was small. It ought to be a sign to her of her slow acceptance into the fold of the royal court in Camelot, but she can only feel the terror all liars must feel, when they come within inches of having their veil of deception ripped from their bodies and all of their lies, without the revealer even knowing that that was what they were doing. At least Lancelot knows enough not to ask about it, at least Lancelot has enough experience of necessary deceptions to at least _try_ to help run interference on her behalf, but it’s not enough, it’s never enough to shake that tremulous dread from Guinevere’s mind and her heart.)

Guinevere’s past is a branching set of roads that go to nowhere: veering off the edge of a cliff, terminating at the back of a cave, circling around the trunk of a tree in a broad hook, spilling out into water. No matter how she wanders back and forth along the well-trodden tracks, she will never find her answers. Merlin could have answered her, but he is beyond giving her the answers that could have filled in all the holes of her past and granted her clarity, and the longer time wears on, the more Guinevere wonders if she would ever be able to trust the answers her father gave her. He has lied to her so long, about so much, and he was the one excised half of her past (or more than half, but Guinevere does not care to contemplate _that_ ), and though that means that he is the only one who could even try to give her back the stories that he dug out of her head and obliterated from the earth, Guinevere can never trust that those tales will not be granted back to her without some sort of agenda in mind, can never trust that the tales he spins for her will be the true accounting of her past.

She is incomplete. She cannot seek ever to make herself complete again. She is incomplete. The roads go nowhere. She still travels down the roads. She has no choice but to try.

For everything under the sun that draws breath and sustains itself based on its warmth, all things under the sun seek to be complete, do they not? When there are holes in your psyche through which your spirit can pour out, you try to patch them up, do you not? You seek a cure for your emptiness, for your incompleteness, you seek an answer to your questions, even if your questions must die in your throat, for you know so little that you know not even how to formulate those questions in the first place.

Guinevere seeks the cure. She does. She is not unique, she is not particularly _special._ She is not someone who thinks she can ever be satisfied with emptiness, not someone who thinks she can gladly spend the rest of her life grappling with knowing her own body and mind to be a tapestry cut into pieces by careless knives wielded in careless, indiscriminate hands. Her body longs for completion. It would gravitate towards it, if it even knew the direction it must gravitate towards.

( _‘You will wither in there. You will be diminished. We both will. But you do not have to be, neither of us do. That is no world for the likes of us. We can be free, we can both be free, if you come with me.’_

She thinks that time might have distorted her memories of that singular conversation at least somewhat. Guinevere does not think she remembers the words correctly, not really. But the quality of his voice as he pleaded with her, that is something that Guinevere thinks will be engraved on her heart in bitterness and doubt until the day she dies.

She chose this. She chose Arthur, she chose Camelot, she chose Arthur’s vision, she chose _Arthur_. Guinevere does not regret the choice she made, or she does not think she does. She does not regret standing at Camelot’s side rather than making herself into its sworn enemy, for all that the stone walls of the city feel more like a cage with each passing month, for all that the water flowing darkling-smooth down below feels more like a potential executioner than Excalibur. She will learn to live with cages, learn to live with the specter of death. There are many who must live with those things, do they not? Her world might be shrinking in scope, but she will learn to forge paths through it, to be all that she has promised she would be.

Guinevere chose this, chose to cleave to what she knew and the purpose she had thought would be hers for her whole life, before the truth of why she was sent to Camelot in the first place was revealed to her. But still she dreams sometimes of the road she had shunned when she turned aside from Mordred and his trees and his plans and his grudges and his vengeful, unforgiving grandmother, when she turned aside from that world, when she rejected that part of herself—that part of them _both_ —and turned back to Arthur and Camelot and their own plans and Arthur’s vision of the ideal world. Still, she dreams.

In her dreams, she is running, not the way a woman runs but the way a deer runs, if a deer could run on its two back legs and yet retain its incredible speed. She runs through the trees without fear of anything the trees might do to her, without fear of any bandits waiting to accost the unwary or any predator that might be lying in wait, for she is not simply a woman, she is something powerful, her veins singing with power and her mind and body so completely, so terribly free that no earthly power could ever have hoped to assail her. She strikes awe into the hearts of all who look upon her. No one can ever hope to assail her, and there are few who would even dare to try, for she is powerful, so powerful, there is power crackling at her fingertips, so bright and so strong that even Excalibur must turn aside rather than rend her flesh as it has rent the corporeal forms of so many like her.

In her dreams, she is running. She flees from nothing. She runs towards nothing. She is running for the sheer, terrible joy of it. Sometimes, she does not run alone.

Whenever Guinevere awakes from these dreams, it always takes a moment for her to remember where she is. It takes a moment to remember her bed and her bedchamber, to remember Arthur for who he is if he lies at her side, to remember Brangien if she can make out the dark shape of her maid in the gloom of an unlit chamber. It takes a longer moment for Guinevere to stifle the disappointment that threatens to scald her heart out of her breast.)

She will bind herself into the shapes she needs to form in order to thrive, here. The knots might fray, but they can be refashioned, and the strands that fray can be fashioned into shapes of their own. All the world is changing every single moment. The world is always changing forever, the world is always warping and distorting into a shape unrecognizable to anyone who has laid eyes on the world as it was before, and she will change with it.

But her past hearkens to her, even if it must hearken with the hollow, empty nothing-voice of a desiccated corpse. Guinevere is speeding on and on and on towards a future as of yet uncertain, but it is difficult for her to ever set her feet confidently down on the path, when she knows she has no past to retreat to, if her future is ever to dissolve before she can even reach it. If her future is ever to be destroyed before she can reach it, she will be trapped in the in-between, languishing in the margins until the void rushes up to swallow her whole.

It would be better if she could remember the face that must connect to those snatches of hummed lullaby that seep out of the mists of her memory, out of the surface of the basin of water in her bedchamber, ringing out whenever the surface of the water is disturbed and ripples splash against the fired clay walls of the bowl. There are times when she can even hear the strains of melody in beads of sweat that spring up on her skin, tears that form at the corners of her eyes, but even when those tears do spill, Guinevere cannot remember the melody in full. She cannot remember the words, if there were ever words. She cannot remember the face of the one who hummed to her, once upon a time.

-

The forest is…

The forest is…

In one sense, it is difficult to hide from yourself in the forest. Mordred is a creature both of human flesh and the green components that made up these forests before the hearts of the trees turned black with rage and the unquenched, unquenchable desire for revenge against all those who have done them harm. That desire for revenge resonates in his very bones, longing and aching and singing, and it is difficult to do anything but sing along with it, when the trees put all their power into their voices. It’s meant to put a fire in the hearts of all those men who might come to the forest again with fire and axes and violence, meant to light a fire under their feet and send them fleeing for their lives. Mordred does not think he was ever meant to be caught up in it, but he has bee, and it is difficult to hide from his own desires, here.

(He would like to believe that he does what he does, sets himself against his family in that world of men purely as a means of preservation of himself and everything like him. He would like to believe his motives pure. He would like to believe that he did not leave a part of his heart behind in Camelot. Mordred would like to believe so many things. But as he says, it is difficult to hide from himself here, at least in some senses. He has become well-acquainted with all of what he really wants, here, though the sensations that flash through his mind and his body are at many points so rapid and cacophonous that it would take a mind far more powerful than his to properly unravel them all. Preservation will be had, but it is not the only thing that will be had.)

In another sense, it is easy to lose yourself in the forest, to bury your thoughts and your feelings and your wants deep down and spend years never so much as looking at them. The wills that inhabit the forest are… are powerful. They are powerful, and heedless of anything but that which is more powerful than themselves. They strive against each other even as they ultimately wish for the same end, and it is so easy to just drown in that cacophony of wills, so easy to revel in the precursor of the unmaking that could be his, if ever he went to the water and cast himself in for true.

(Does he want that? Does he want that? Does he, does he? One must be _alive_ to carry out one’s goals, generally speaking, and Mordred has no successor who could carry the torch after him, if Excalibur is ever to rend him the way it once rent his father, but there was a time when once he had hoped—

He is beyond hoping, now. And he does not know for truth if oblivion would be a welcome guest to invade his body, after all is said and done.)

Mordred thinks of his father in these days, these days he spends pushing forward down the path he has forged fro himself, and never daring to hope. He thinks of ambitions and fears that must by necessity come out of the past, the thinks of last stands and last wishes and last thoughts and every working in the body that must peter out into nothing with death. The dark queen has no champion, now, she requires none and will have none when her rage is so great that when at last she strikes, she will strike with a fury that will make the last war seem a scuffle between children in a sheltered courtyard, but she had a champion, once, she had a champion who was of her own flesh, and sometimes Mordred wonders, oh, he wonders—

He wonders if he might not understand his father a little better, if ever he was to take up that particular mantle. He wonders if, by inhabiting the role his father once inhabited, he might gain a little more insight, might be able to peer past the green, a little way into his heart.

But his father is dead, and his flesh is brown and desiccated and swallowed up by fire and earth, and there is no heart left to perceive. It would be like staring into a mirror whose surface is so caked with filth that it can show you nothing, not even yourself.

Mordred derives no insight from the forest. The forest can provide him only with baser impulses.

For a time, those baser impulses can sustain him.

For a time.

-

She dreams of water.

Guinevere vowed to herself that she would make a life in Camelot. That life has not always been without trials, has not been without its frustrations, has not been without its doubts and regrets, but it is a _life_. A girl who was actually born to be a queen might have done better, but thankfully, this is not a typical kingdom, and it is instead a place that, slowly, but surely, learns to adapt to her rather than it being simply a matter of her being made to adapt to it, the way a river cuts a path through—

Arthur is weighed down with cares. Over time, they come to know each other better, and though Guinevere would not have needed to know him better to know this of him—even a stranger could see how consumed Arthur is with the idea that he must spend his life atoning for and rectifying his father’s many abuses—greater knowledge and familiarity leaves Guinevere better-equipped to give him counsel. Arthur and the kingdom alike, when she speaks of knowledge and counsel. If this is to be her home for all her days, she prefers to _know_ it, to become so well-acquainted that there are no longer any secrets for it to hold, not anymore, unless you count the secret of its construction, for no one knows aught of that.

So she listens, and she learns, and though her magic grows quieter within her, it does not diminish, but instead seems only to shift in purpose and in weight, becoming something steadfast and rooted to this place, trying to put a voice in the stone, though the stone, for all that it rarely uses its voice, still has enough of one that it resists all attempts to be overlaid and forgotten. She must respect that. There was something here before her, after all. She must respect what came before.

Guinevere may have been lied to when she was told she was being sent here as a protector, but she can still be something like that, can still have a purpose here that is not purely dynastic in nature. She has listened to the songs, of course, listened to ballads and tales, and for all that some of the knights might speak disparagingly, she knows that there is more to being a lady, more to being a queen, than to be pretty and smile and bear her husband sons.

It is difficult to put into words, for no one ever says or sings it outright, but a lady is… a lady is the _center_ of her household. She is the weight that keeps the household anchored to the earth, keeps it from flying off in the first stiff breeze to assail it. She is what ultimately keeps all things flowing smoothly, and without her, everything quickly begins to collapse in on itself.

(A slightly different way of saying this would be to say that the lady is the heart of her household. But Guinevere can never quite make her mouth fit around the sounds it would need to form to articulate thus. It does not fit, it cannot fit, it will never fit.

For her to be the heart of a household, she must be complete. She is not complete. There are few who ever look at her and even guess at it, but here she is, well-established, and not complete. She does not wish to inspect herself to see if she has any heart to give. She does not think she would like what she wound find.)

Guinevere strives to be the center of her household, to be the center of Camelot. It’s not… not easy. It’s not always rewarding, either. But she has Brangien and Dindrane and Lancelot to think about, and everyone else besides, and she came here to be a queen, even if she is not a particularly conventional one. These are her people, and she must look after them.

So why does she dream of water?

Why, after all this time, does she dream of water?

Water is anathema to her and she has never been totally submerged, _never_ , even in empty spaces left behind in the gashes in her memory there must never have been a time when she was totally submerged, for a creature of her nature would be unmade if she was ever totally submerged, if she was ever pushed down into the water and she looked through a curtain of water that would be the end of her, it would, it would, as it must for every last thing of her kind, so why—

(She must have had a mother, once.)

Water is anathema to Guinevere and all creatures like her. It would not be her death to be submerged, for death is too mild a term to describe what would become of her. To be unmade is… She would take any torture over the prospect of being unmade. She would take the rack, the screws, the tongue-cutting, the eye-gouging, the burning, all of it, over being unraveled and unwound and cast to the winds, her component parts so utterly broken that they can never form her shape again.

Water is poison to her more vile than arsenic. Water will be something far worse to her than death. If ever she dreams of water, it should not be with any true familiarity. It should be the most terrible of nightmares to her, worse than any dreams she has ever had of burning, when her fear mounts within her that she will be discovered for who and what she is by the court. Should be, should be, should be.

Should be, should be, and yet, the reality is—

She does not know how to swim. Something like her could never have learned how to swim. You could more easily ask a worm to sprout legs and run from the bird trying to pluck it up from the earth than you could ask Guinevere to swim. And yet, in her dreams, she swims. She does not know how she knows that what she does is swimming, but she does know that much, knows that her body moves through dream-water under its own power and by its own will, rather than being buffeted along by what even in dreams should unmake her dream self, and yet embraces her like she is its dearest friend. She knows that she is swimming in a place where she should be drowning, should be screaming, should be unraveling without any recourse or reprieve. She knows that she is doing something so totally beyond her that she could more easily sprout wings and fly off towards the sun.

(She must have had another name, once.)

Should be, should be, should be utterly terrified, and yet, when locked in the world of the dream, though her mind remains just enough in the waking world to be cognizant of the fact that terror would be wiser, there is no fear in her. There is no strain of dread in her heart putting her pulse to pounding, no thread of fear making her body ache as she tries to clamber up to the surface and away from what would not be her grave, if only because there would be no body left to house it. In her dreams, she never tries to escape the water. She has only the vaguest notion of the water as something she should even be trying to escape. In the water, her dream self finds contentment, her dream self finds fulfillment, her dream self feels _safe_ , her dream self regards it as—

This cannot be anything but the mad fancy of a dream. Guinevere has spent enough time in Camelot to hear countless tales of mad dreams experienced by the knights and the ladies and all the lords and common folk after a fever, or after eating food they thought might have gone bad, or drinking too much wine or mead, or under the baleful clouds of a thunderstorm. People can dream of anything under the sun, even if it doesn’t make any sense, for the mind is more flexible and more powerful than the body, and dreams are for some more powerful by far than the waking world.

It doesn’t make—“ _My love. My lady.”_ —any sense.

(She must have had another name, once. Who gave her that name? Who called out to her with that name?)

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t have to make any sense. Does not, does not, does not, _does not_.

Guinevere dreams of water.

She cannot stop.

She does not know why. She fears she does.

-

There will come a day when they have come beyond all grudges, all divergent paths, all hates and all griefs. There will come a day when such things have no power over them any longer, for how far they have come dictates that they must be beyond such things. It is not a happy occasion. They are not happy to have come beyond all grudges and divergent paths, considering how they got to be there. But they are where they are, and they cannot turn back. All roads back have been burned against them.

Mordred will look at Guinevere and think: You are stronger than I gave you credit for. Your eyes have not gone gray, with no tint of green or blue left within, as I had thought they would be. You have not withered within those walls of stone, as I had feared you would. The world is pushing us out towards the margins, and it is pressing in all the times on those margins, closer and closer, until the only fate for those like us is to be crushed between the pages of history. I thought it would be quicker, for you, once you chose to make a life for yourself in the seat of those who wish us all gone. I was wrong. It has changed to suit you, instead.

Guinevere will look at Mordred and think: How altered I have found you. How little you resemble the man I met, so many years ago. But still, I know you.

That day comes, and Mordred finds Guinevere sitting at the edge of the water as the sun sinks into it, red and dim, turning still water to something very close to blood. She is beating her hands against the water and not flinching, not even hesitating, as the water does not sting her, does not burn her, does not unmake, but instead embraces her as one of its own.

“Come back, come back!” she cries, and for a moment, Mordred does not understand what it is that she is doing, for the ship has set sail and passed out of sight over the edge of the horizon, and her eyes were dry when it carried off its precious cargo.

But the moment passes, Mordred’s mind works again, and he understands.

His weary, aching body can barely carry him to where she kneels by the water, bent now so low over it that the strands of her long, loose hair have pooled in it and fan out like hands of their own, pleading and importuning and demanding, that same cry, over and over again: “Come back, come back, come back.” But Mordred is used to pain. His life has been pain. Of all the things that has kept him from going to her side over the years, pain has never been one of them.

“Guinevere.” It’s such a relief to fall to his knees behind her. He’s not certain he’ll be able to stand back up again, at least not for a while. Pain is pain and pain has always been something at least partly under his control, but his body is something else, and his body has its limits. He may not be able to stand up for a while. He may not be able to stand up at all. For now, though, Mordred sets his hands on Guinevere’s shoulders, and shakes. “Guinevere, enough.”

She does not respond to him at first, still persistently beating her hands against the surface of water that will never do anything but yield to her. Mordred would reach out and take her hands, but water that will never harm her would harm him _badly_ , and while he learned long ago to live with pain, he does not court unmaking needlessly. (The end will come soon, he thinks. He does not think himself as someone who was ever meant to long outlive his royal uncle. The story does not seem… does not seem _right_ , that way.)

Mordred shakes her shoulders a little harder, biting back a strange, labored breath in his mouth that sounds oddly like a sob. “Guinevere, enough.” It’s the end. It’s the end of everything, and he tries to be a little gentle in this eerie silence at the end of it all, though it does not fit naturally into his mouth, not anymore. “Guinevere,” he tells her, and tries earnestly to be gentle, though it does not come easy anymore, “there is nothing left to call. Enough.”

He had not thought that creatures of such power as what arose from the water could be killed in truth. His experiences these past few hours have proven him wrong. He has been proven wrong on so many things.

Later, Mordred will never be able to tell for certain if this was what finally convinced Guinevere to cease her fruitless pleas, or if she had just grown tired of it. But Guinevere slowly sits up straight, slowly takes her hands away from the water, just a few feet, and when Mordred starts pulling her back from the water, she offers no resistance. It will be safer for them both, a few feet from the water. Water might not be something willing to offer Guinevere any harm, but still, Mordred worries—

What he worries about does not seem terribly important, anymore.

They sit at each other’s sides as they have not done in years, any pretension of grudges or hard lines that have been crossed and can never be crossed back over dissolved in the face of the future having come for them both at last, and that future being nothing like what either of them had expected or wanted. The sun sinks lower and lower in the west, the bloodied sands of Camlann growing dimmer and dimmer, a dense, silvery fog rolling in from the south.

“What…” Guinevere’s voice is cracked as if she has been weeping, though her eyes have been dry and her mouth silent and her body still for the past… Mordred does not even know how long. “What was it like?”

They’re leaning against each other, more out of exhaustion than out of any real desire for closeness, though Mordred thinks he would have found that in himself, at least, if he wasn’t so tired. His exhaustion drags at his voice as he replies to her, his voice almost slurred now, “What was what like?”

He catches sight of a glint of green, out of the corner of his eye, but it shifts to blue and that, above all else, tells him that it was her eyes that he has seen. “I don’t…” The words crawl from her lips as if she has had to loop a leash about their necks and drag them. “…I still don’t remember. The memories are… They’re gone. It’s not that they’re locked away; they’re just _gone_. They’re not there for me to try reach, there’s nothing to reach for, I can’t remember her at _all_ —“

She cuts herself off before her voice can hitch and wobble into weeping. Mordred is not sure whether the strange, stinging feeling that wells up in his breast at that is gratitude, or regret. He sighs, more because he needs the breath than out of any real weariness—that would have to be new weariness, and he doesn’t think the old has room for competition, at this present moment.

“If you wish to know what it was like for me,” he says tiredly, “then I suppose you should know that I’ve spent my whole life trying to sort out what I thought of my father in my mind, and I still cannot say for certain. I know that I loved him, but I never understood him, not really. He was not someone I could hold a conversation with. He would have been confused, and I overwhelmed.”

“And did he love you?” The voice with which she asks is so faint that Mordred could easily imagine that he was merely hearing things, but he can feel the vibration of her voice echoing in her chest, and this is no illusion, no illusion at all.

Mordred shrugs. There is nothing else for him to do. “Maybe.” He remembers the hand that set upon his head, the hand that bloomed white flowers like beads of snow. “Perhaps.” He remembers his mother’s smile when she took him to meet his father for the first time, remembers how her whole demeanor had changed when they went to that green place where his father could be found. “I think so. I hope so. But it is not a love that a human mind—“ or a mostly human mind “—could ever hope to understand.”

“That’s cheerful,” Guinevere mutters.

A startled laugh jars up out of Mordred’s chest. It only hurts a little bit. “It is what it is, Guinevere. Those like us, we’re caught between the parent who can never fully understand us, and the parent we can never fully understand. There’s nothing to do but live with it.”

The green-blue light at the corner of Mordred’s vision blinks out suddenly, and when he turns to look at her, she has squeezed her eyes shut, her pale, freckled face creased with pain. “I wanted more than that,” she whispers.

“…So did I,” he admits.

They sit there in silence, at the shores in Camlann, as the sun sinks lower down, until the bloodied water reflects stars and the gloom of night, and there is no light left to see by.


End file.
